Architecting for Innovation

This article is an editorial note submitted to CCR. It has NOT been peer reviewed. The authors take full responsibility for this article’s technical content. Comments can be posted through CCR Online. We argue that the biggest problem with the current Internet architecture is not a particular functional deficiency, but its inability to accommodate innovation. To address this problem we propose a minimal architectural “framework ” in which comprehensive architectures can reside. The proposed Framework for Internet Innovation (FII) — which is derived from the simple observation that network interfaces should be extensible and abstract — allows for a diversity of architectures to coexist, communicate, and evolve. We demonstrate FII’s ability to accommodate diversity and evolution with a detailed examination of how information flows through the architecture and with a skeleton implementation of the relevant interfaces